Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (28 page)

Wright, Alex. 2008. “The Web Time Forgot.”
The New York Times
(June 17).

In the 1960s, Ted Nelson took Bush’s ideas and extended them to support a new paradigm for literature in a networked world. He coined the term
hypertext
and proposed ideas that are current today, like virtually including one work inside another and using micropayments.

Nelson, Theodor Holm. 1993.
Literary Machines
. Sausalito, Calif.: Mindful Press.

Nelson, Theodor Holm. 1999. “Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More Than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use.”
Computing Surveys
(ACM) 3, issue 4es (December).

Another pioneer in the 1960s who was inspired by Bush was Douglas En glebart, who founded a research lab with the goal of “augmenting human intellect.” His lab developed a hypermedia groupware system called Augment (originally called NLS). Augment supported bookmarks, hyperlinks, recording of e-mail, a journal, and more.

Engelbart, Douglas C. “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 Under Contract AF 49(638)- 1024,” SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, October 1962.

———. “Authorship Provisions in AUGMENT.” COMPCON ’84 Digest:
Proceedings of the COMPCON Conference,
San Francisco, California, February 27-March 1, 1984, 465-72.

Many others besides us have noted the inadequacy of conventional computer file systems. Here are a few representative works.

Adar, Eytan, David Karger, and Lynn Andrea Stein. “Haystack: Per-User Information Environments,”
1999 Proceedings of the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management,
Kansas City, Mo., 1999, 413-422.

Dourish, Paul, Keith Edwards, Anthony LaMarca, John Lamping, Karin Petersen, Michael Salisbury, Douglas Terry, and Jim Thornton. 2000. “Extending Document Management Systems with User-Specific Active Properties.”
ACM TOIS
18, no. 2: 140-70.

Gifford, David K., Pierre Jouvelot, Mark A. Sheldon, and James W. O’Toole Jr. “Semantic File Systems.” Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 1991, 16-25.

Maier, David. “Care and Feeding of Your PetDB.” NSF Workshop on Context-Aware Mobile Database Management (CAMM), January 24, 2002.

Olsen, Michael A. “The Design and Implementation of the Inversion File System,” 1993 Winter USENIX, San Diego, California, January 25-29, 1993.

You can find nearly everything about MyLifeBits at the Web site
www.MyLifeBits.com
. Here are some of the key papers:

Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gemmell. 2007. “A Digital Life.”
Scientific American
(March).

Gemmell, Jim, Gordon Bell, and Roger Lueder. 2006. “MyLifeBits: A Personal Database for Everything.”
Communications of the ACM
49, issue 1 (January): 88-95.

Gemmell, Jim, Gordon Bell, Roger Lueder, Steven Drucker, and Curtis Wong. “MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the Memex Vision.” ACM Multimedia ’02, Juan-les-Pins, France, December 1-6, 2002, 235-38.

And here are some of the best articles written about MyLifeBits:

Cherry, Steven. 2005. “Total Recall.”
IEEE Spectrum
(November). Thompson, Clive. 2006. “A Head for Detail.”
Fast Company
(November). Wilkinson, Alec. 2007. “Remember This.”
The New Yorker
(May 28).

Look for the latest on SenseCam at
research.microsoft.com
—here are some published papers about it:

Berry, E., N. Kapur, L. Williams, S. Hodges, P. Watson, G. Smyth, J. Srinivasan, R. Smith, B. Wilson, and K. Wood. 2007. “The Use of a Wearable Camera, SenseCam, as a Pictorial Diary to Improve Autobiographical Memory in a Patient with Limbic Encephalitis.” In research.microsoft. com: Psychology Press, 582-681.

Harper, R., D. Randall, N. Smyth, C. Evans, L. Heledd, and R. Moore. 2007. “Thanks for the Memory.” Human-Computer Interaction Conference, Lancaster, UK, 2007.

Laursen, Lucas. A Memorable Device,
Science
13 March 2009: 1422-23.

Sellen, A., A. Fogg, S. Hodges, and K. Wood. “Do Life-Logging Technologies Support Memory for the Past? An Experimental Study Using SenseCam.” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’07, Irvine, California, 2007, 81-90.

Berry, E., M. Conway, C. Moulin, H. Williams, S. Hodges, L. Williams, K. Wood, and G. Smith. 2006. “Stimulating Episodic Memory: Initial Explorations Using SenseCam.”
Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society, 47th Annual Meeting
11:56-57. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gemmell, Jim, Lyndsay Williams, Ken Wood, Roger Lueder, and Gordon Bell. “Passive Capture and Ensuing Issues for a Personal Lifetime Store.”
Proceedings of the First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences
(CARPE ’04), New York, October 15, 2004, 48-55.

Hodges, Steve, Lyndsay Williams, Emma Berry, Shahram Izadi, James Srinivasan, Alex Butler, Gavin Smyth, Narinder Kapur, and Ken Wood. 2006. “SenseCam: a Retrospective Memory Aid.” In Dourish and A. Friday, eds.,
Ubicomp 2006: Ubiquitous Computing.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4206: 177-193. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag 2006.

StartleCam is another sensor-triggered wearable camera. It uses multiple skin conductivity sensors worn on the fingers. The sensors are used to detect the startle response in the wearer, and save the recently captured images, which will presumably be of events that aroused the user’s attention.

Healey, J., and R. W. Picard. “StartleCam: A Cybernetic Wearable Camera.”
Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Wearable Computing
, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 19-20, 1998.

A system called u-Photo extends the action of picture taking to also include capturing the state of devices and sensor values in the camera’s view. LED tags are placed on objects to determine if they are in view. For instance, a picture of a room may also record the information that the lights are on, that the temperature is seventy-four degrees, and that a movie is playing at a certain point.

Iwamoto, Takeshi, Genta Suzuki, Shun Aoki, Naohiko Kohtake, Ka zunori Takashio, and Hideyuki Tokuda. “u-Photo: A Design and Implementation of a Snapshot Based Method for Capturing Contextual Information.” Pervasive 2004 Workshop on Memory and Sharing of Experiences, Vienna, Austria, April 20, 2004.

The remote control in your home—or perhaps that you carry with you—can even be part of lifelogging.

Abe, M., Y. Morinishi, A. Maeda, M. Aoki, and H. Inagaki. 2009. “A Life Log Collector Integrated with a Remote-Controller for Enabling User Centric Services.”
IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics
55, no. 1.

Cathal Gurrin’s Web page is
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~cgurrinand
here are some of his papers about e-memories.

Doherty, A., C. Gurrin, G. Jones, and A. F. Smeaton. “Retrieval of Similar Travel Routes Using GPS Tracklog Place Names.” SIGIR 2006—Conference on Research and Development on Information Retrieval, Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, Seattle, Washington, August 6-11, 2006.

Gurrin, C., A. F. Smeaton, D. Byrne, N. O’Hare, G. Jones, and N. O’Connor. “An Examination of a Large Visual Lifelog.” AIRS 2008—Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, Harbin, China, January 16-18, 2008.

Lavelle, B., D. Byrne, C. Gurrin, A. F. Smeaton, and G. Jones. “Bluetooth Familiarity: Methods of Calculation, Applications and Limitations.” MIRW 2007—Mobile Interaction with the Real World, Workshop at the MobileHCI07: 9th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, Singapore, September 9, 2007.

Lee, H., A. F. Smeaton, N. O’Connor, G. Jones, M. Blighe, D. Byrne, A. Doherty, and C. Gurrin. 2008. “Constructing a SenseCam Visual Diary as a Media Process.”
Multimedia Systems Journal,
Special Issue on Canonical Processes of Media Production (in press) 14, no. 6:341-49.

Smeaton, A. F., N. O’Connor, G. Jones, G. Gaughan, H. Lee, and C. Gurrin. “SenseCam Visual Diaries Generating Memories for Life.” Poster presented at the Memories for Life Colloquium 2006, British Library Conference Centre, London, UK, December 12, 2006. [BibTex] Memories For Life Web site.

We started the CARPE (Capture, Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences) research workshop. Many interesting papers about lifelogging were presented at these workshops.

CARPE Web page.
http://www.sigmm.org/Members/jgemmell/CARPE

The Microsoft Research Digital Memories program gave funding, MyLifeBits software, and SenseCams to fourteen universities. You can find information about the projects, including the published articles.

Digital Memories program Web site.
http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/collaboration/focus/cs/memex.aspx

3. THE MEETING OF E-MEMORY AND BIOMEMORY

Some books that explain how our brains remember, misremember, and forget. Daniel Schacter’s seven sins of memory are: transience (the loss of memories over time), absentmindedness (forgetting due to inattentive-ness, or forgetting what you meant to do), blocking (the temporary inability to recall something, like someone’s name), misattribution (assigning a memory to the wrong source), suggestibility (memories planted by suggestions or leading questions), bias (using current knowledge to revise past memories), and persistence (unwanted recall of a memory).

Kandel, Eric. 2007.
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.

Schacter, Daniel L. 2001.
The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers
. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Wang, Sam, and Sandra Aamodt. 2008.
Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.
New York: Bloomsbury USA.

Forgetfulness tends to get worse as we age, and midlife is often marked by a sharp increase in absentmindedness, as delightfully described by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin in
Carved in Sand
. She takes the reader on a midlife quest for improved memory, covering the gamut from synthetic estrogen to mental aerobics.

Ramin, Cathryn Jakobson. 2007.
Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife
. New York: HarperCollins.

We quote Joseph LeDoux answering the Edge’s 2008 question “What have you changed your mind about?” LeDoux is the author of
The Synaptic Self: How Our Brain Becomes Who We Are.

LeDoux in Edge.
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_1.html

David Allen’s
Getting Things Done
advocates a “logical and trusted system outside of your head.” His insight that “if your reference material doesn’t have a nice clean edge to it, the line between actionable and nonaction able items will blur” points out how important an e-memory of reference material, in addition to action items, can be. In addition to the
Getting Things Done
book, there are conferences, seminars, software tools, and a host of Web articles devoted to helping you implement the
Getting Things Done
methodology.

Allen, David. 2003.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
New York: Penguin Books.

Allen’s Web site.
http://www.davidco.com

Regarding false memories of sexual abuse, Elizabeth Loftus writes, “Now, nearly two decades later, there are hundreds of studies to support a high degree of memory distortion. People have recalled nonexistent broken glass and tape recorders, a clean-shaven man as having a mustache, straight hair as curly, and even something as large and conspicuous as a barn in a bucolic scene that contained no buildings at all.” “The repressed memory cases,” she observes, “are another outlet for women’s rage over sexual violence. Although women’s anger is certainly justified in many cases, and may be justified in some repressed memory cases too, it is time to stop and ask whether the net of rage has been cast too widely, creating a new collective nightmare.”

Loftus, Elizabeth F. 1993. “The Reality of Repressed Memories.”
American Psychologist
48:518-37.

Danitz, Tiffany. 1997. “Making Up Memories?”
Insight on the News
(December 15).

Researchers at Dublin City University have done some really interesting work on dealing with thousands of SenseCam pictures (see also the work under Cathal Gurrin from the previous chapter).

Blighe, M., H. Le Borgne, N. O’Connor, A. F. Smeaton, and G. Jones. “Exploiting Context Information to Aid Landmark Detection in SenseCam Images.” ECHISE 2006—2nd International Workshop on Exploiting Context Histories in Smart Environments—Infrastructures and Design, 8th International Conference of Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2006), Orange County, California, September 17-21, 2006.

Byrne, D. 2007. “SenseCam Flow Visualization for LifeLog Image Browsing.”
BCS IRSG Informer,
no. 22 (Spring).

Byrne, D., B. Lavelle, A. Doherty, G. Jones, and A. F. Smeaton. “Using Bluetooth and GPS Metadata to Measure Event Similarity in SenseCam Images,” IMAI ’07—5th International Conference on Intelligent Multi media and Ambient Intelligence, Salt Lake City, Utah, July 18-24, 2007.

Doherty, A., A. F. Smeaton, K. Lee, and D. Ellis. “Multimodal Segmentation of Lifelog Data.” Eighth RIAO Conference—Large-Scale Semantic Access to Content (Text, Image, Video and Sound), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 30-June 1, 2007.

Lee, Hyowon, Alan F. Smeaton, Noel E. O’Connor, and Gareth J. F. Jones. “Adaptive Visual Summary of LifeLog Photos for Personal Information Management.” AIR 2006—First International Workshop on Adaptive Information Retrieval, Glasgow, UK, October 14, 2006.